AMD Radeon RX Vega matches GTX 1080 in 3DMark Fire Strike

A benchmark run ahead of official launch.

We still have about a week before AMD lifts the curtain on its Radeon RX Vega lineup for gamers, at which point we will have much more to talk about. In the meantime, it appears that someone from AMD's marketing team has uploaded scores to 3DMark from a Radeon RX Vega card.

The keen-eyed folks at Guru3D noticed that the entries in 3DMark's database were uploaded by "TheGameTechnician." That is the handle for Jason Evangelho, a former Forbes contributor who last summer was hired to be AMD's senior technical marketing specialist. Unless someone is spoofing his online moniker, we can reasonable assume these scores are legit.

It's not clear if the Radeon RX Vega that made these benchmark runs was an air cooled model or came with an all-in-one liquid cooler. The sample is clocked at 1,630MHz with 8GB of HBM2 memory running at 945MHz. It was paired with an Intel Core i7-5960X processor.

The card was benchmarked three times in 3DMark's Fire Strike test. It returned graphics scores of 22,330 points, 22,291 points, and 20,949 points. The average of all three is around 21,857. That is faster than a GeForce GTX 1070 and comparable to a GeForce GTX 1080, but slower than a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

While nothing is yet official, this is further evidence that Radeon RX Vega will compete with the GeForce GTX 1080. It's the same card from Nvidia that AMD used to compare performance with its Radeon RX Vega in Budapest, where the company challenged gamers to tell the difference between the two while gaming.

If that's the case, it will be interesting to see how pricing shakes out. Earlier rumors suggested Vega will cost $650 to $700. That would be a tough sell if it can't hang with the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.